F*ck them! Here we go again, letting bureaucrats limit our freedom and track us everywhere. Anyone that doesn't see how one limit leads to another should open his eyes.
> Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions. Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions. And anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers (hosted wallets) will be prohibited even for minimum amounts without a threshold.
For the regular person, there is no issue here. Cash is still fine, anonymous payments are possible.
Anonymous online / digital payments seems to exclusively facilitate crime, but doesn’t seem to be relevant to regular ‘normal’ people.
I think banning anonymous crypto payments is therefore a good thing.
The vast majority of people shopping online do so with their identity known and that’s totally OK (and required when buying physical stuff)
A ton of people will probably want to point out at this point that banks and merchants sell their customer data and their shopping behavior, which to me is absolute bonkers and immoral. However that’s a different issue, one that is only fixed with legislation, which makes it a political topic.
Anonymous crypto payments may also help specific dissidents in certain countries but that upside doesn’t justify the enormous downside.
To be honest, I don't think that attitude is good enough. There are technical ways to prevent money laundering and tax evasion at the same time as keeping anonymous payments possible.
Sure, it's more complicated than just outright banning any type of anonymous payment, but I think not even trying would amount to a huge loss of resiliency for any democracy.
We also don't blanket ban secure private communications (although not for a lack of trying) for the same reason.
Yeah, it actually does. Societies cannot be left to the whims of privately owned payment processors that depend on the 'public sentiment' and not the actual laws to make their policies to protect their stock value.
If every government guaranteed an online payment system that 100% worked for all legal purposes, you'd have point. There's no such thing. The entire digital payment system is left to private feudal lords to control as they please.
If a handful of payment processors can decide who can get money or not, it sounds like you need laws to force them to be neutral. Imagine if you couldn't put a truck on a road because the road is owned by someone that doesn't like your business!
The number one thing criminals are known for is following the law, so they will absolutely be certain never to accidentally do a cash payment over the limit.
Yeah, that type of thing is a problem. I feel that anyone operating a legal business should be able to receive payments. I don't know what the best way to achieve that would be: make it illegal for payment processors to refuse customers registered with the chamber of commerce? Set up a community bank to handle this? Something else? Idk.
That said, one of my gripes with a lot of this cryptostuff is that people want it to both be recognized as real money, but also not be beholden to any regulation they don't like. Can't have both.
Doesn't it say it right there in the first paragraph?
> And anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers (hosted wallets) will be prohibited even for minimum amounts without a threshold.
Doesn't this mean that literally all anonymous crypto transactions would be banned?
I'm a big fan of anonymous payments as a component of a resilient democracy, but to me, there's an amount cap where the tradeoff starts getting skewed from that to facilitating money laundering, tax evasion and other bad things.
I can imagine dozens of good use cases for <€5000 anonymous payments, but not many above that.
If there's real demand for it, I think we should come up with a technical solution that e.g. provides one-sided privacy like GNU Taler (taxation usually happens at the payee level, so the payer can usually remain anonymous; the same applies to things like terror financing etc).
The thing is, limits like this are never, ever raised.
40 years ago Canada got rid of the $1000 and $500 note. In all that time, the idea of bringing the $500 back has never been floated.
Yet soon, $100 will be worth $20 back then. I already find myself using $100s all the time, I used to fill my car for $25 in the 80s, now it's $80. Groceries are the same, I used to buy $30 per week, now it's over $100.
As time progresses, you'll have to carry a briefcase to buy gas or groceries.
So 5000 may seem like a good limit, but in 20 years
you may not be able to buy groceries, or get gas, or buy a computer with cash or record keeping.
I always pay cash for my hardware. I don't need the store to link my serial number to my credit card number. I'm already using MAC addresses off of old ISA NIC cards.
I carried wads of cash when I lived in Indonesia, because card acceptance is so unreliable it's easier to just pay by cash. Bills of 100,000 (~€6.50) are the largest, and while prices are lower than in Europe or Canada, they're not necessarily that much lower for a lot of things. It's a bit awkward, but doable I guess shrug.
I paid 6 million in cash for my scooter, and you can imagine what that looked like. Upshot is I felt very rich and like one of those fellas in those rap videos throwing around money.
Hah! I know this feeling, but only because I'm a bit of an asshat.
I friend lent me $2000 back in the day, so I went to the bank, and got 400 $5 bills. It actually felt empowering, and my friend even had a great time of it.
Yet it wasn't $6M, which just feels like a big number... no matter what the currency.
That's one problem, but the other is that big parts of our lives are moving online/digital, even in the physical world.
Getting gas at night in rural parts of the US without a credit or debit card is already practically impossible – there's nobody there to take your cash. Card-only restaurants, vending machines, shops etc. are already a reality in some countries as well.
I think we urgently need a semi-anonymous, cash-like alternative for low-value online and offline payments, because I feel like once we've lost the anonymity of cash completely, there's no way it'll be reintroduced in a digital equivalent.
The discussion around this seems largely poisoned though, with a lot of vocal crypto/libertarian takes on one side (often tangling the payment privacy aspect with monetary policy), and "nothing to hide, log everything, credit cards and ACH are perfection" on the other.
The US began withdrawing their $500/1000/5000/10000 notes in the 1960s as well; the last issues were nominally before WWII.
There was some discussion around the turn of the century that the introduction of the 200/500 Euro notes might impact the USD's status as the dominant "notes in a coffee can buried in the yard" store of wealth for the developing world, but it never went anywhere.
It is interesting that this seems to be a remarkable amount of faith in inflation being a managed slow-walk-- if you had Weimar-style inflation, any fixed limit would be blown through in weeks. Although, perhaps that's a secondary objective there-- if an economy with high paper-trail requirements starts to overheat, pinching the monitoring system might provide additional leverage.
It’s important to remember that money-laundering is a secondary crime. There is always an underlying crime, and money laundering is just its effect. Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened). With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.
AML is a very convinient tool for anyone who wants to abuse power.
> Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened).
It prevents crimes as long as the people who would be committing them know it’s hard to cash out. As a simple example, phone theft was much worse in the United States a decade or so back because a teenager could grab a phone, wipe it, and get hundreds of USD. It plummeted once the stolen IMEI database went into effect because nobody buys a phone which can’t get service. It didn’t have to go to zero to be worth doing – just getting the easy money guys out often makes a big difference.
The question is: if the new regulations will make it harder to cash out, or is it very hard to cash out already. If it is the latter, the new regulations do not contribute to the solving new crimes. In this case, the new regulations are not needed and the lobbying behind them is not about preventing crime, but about the interest of industry stakeholders. Such stakeholders include software companies that sell anti-money laundering solutions.
> Thus, anti-money laundering do not solve or prevent any crime (crime has already happened).
Sure, but "follow the money" can be an incredibly powerful tool for criminal investigations.
> With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.
That's a concern I definitely share. I think there needs to be a push for a privacy-preserving middle ground between the complete two-sided anonymity of cash and some cryptocurrencies on one side, and the data privacy nightmare that's traditional electronic payment methods.
Generally prohibiting anonymous payments would at best have minimal effects on crime, but it would deprive innocent citizens of their financial freedom. The medicines or sex toys I buy is nobody’s business
The consequences of KYC are way worse than that. You have to interact with someone in power when you make a payment, thats the bad part. Cause that someone now have a good occasion to hurt you (racism, discrimination, political opposition, wars, etc).
Im speaking from experience here. Moreover the rich and powerful makes payments the way they want lets not fool ourselves.
Now granted they catch some dirty shit with KYC but we'd like to see some report on the extent of that at least.
I like to pick on them for this too, but it doesn't bother me as much as the apologists who say things like "this doesn't affect most people, you'll still be able to do what you do." I hear "it's not boiling the frog. It's no big deal if the Dutch government keeps records of peoples religion." Europeans trust governments way too much, which is crazy seeing their history, it's almost like they're domesticated. Really bizarre to me.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadYou own nothing and you will be happy.
For the regular person, there is no issue here. Cash is still fine, anonymous payments are possible.
Anonymous online / digital payments seems to exclusively facilitate crime, but doesn’t seem to be relevant to regular ‘normal’ people.
I think banning anonymous crypto payments is therefore a good thing.
The vast majority of people shopping online do so with their identity known and that’s totally OK (and required when buying physical stuff)
A ton of people will probably want to point out at this point that banks and merchants sell their customer data and their shopping behavior, which to me is absolute bonkers and immoral. However that’s a different issue, one that is only fixed with legislation, which makes it a political topic.
Anonymous crypto payments may also help specific dissidents in certain countries but that upside doesn’t justify the enormous downside.
Sure, it's more complicated than just outright banning any type of anonymous payment, but I think not even trying would amount to a huge loss of resiliency for any democracy.
We also don't blanket ban secure private communications (although not for a lack of trying) for the same reason.
If every government guaranteed an online payment system that 100% worked for all legal purposes, you'd have point. There's no such thing. The entire digital payment system is left to private feudal lords to control as they please.
That said, one of my gripes with a lot of this cryptostuff is that people want it to both be recognized as real money, but also not be beholden to any regulation they don't like. Can't have both.
Or you could ID and pay directly.
How so and is there anything to back that up or is that just a gut feeling?
I pay for my VPN subscription online, anonymously using crypto. Am I facilitating crime?
No, and you'll continue to be able to do so under the new regulation unless I'm missing something.
> And anonymous payments in cryptocurrencies to wallets operated by providers (hosted wallets) will be prohibited even for minimum amounts without a threshold.
Doesn't this mean that literally all anonymous crypto transactions would be banned?
The strictness of AML/KYC is half the reason why it's easier to use crypto than banking. They're removing the glitch.
And yes the limit on 3k/10k seems low
I can imagine dozens of good use cases for <€5000 anonymous payments, but not many above that.
If there's real demand for it, I think we should come up with a technical solution that e.g. provides one-sided privacy like GNU Taler (taxation usually happens at the payee level, so the payer can usually remain anonymous; the same applies to things like terror financing etc).
40 years ago Canada got rid of the $1000 and $500 note. In all that time, the idea of bringing the $500 back has never been floated.
Yet soon, $100 will be worth $20 back then. I already find myself using $100s all the time, I used to fill my car for $25 in the 80s, now it's $80. Groceries are the same, I used to buy $30 per week, now it's over $100.
As time progresses, you'll have to carry a briefcase to buy gas or groceries.
So 5000 may seem like a good limit, but in 20 years you may not be able to buy groceries, or get gas, or buy a computer with cash or record keeping.
I always pay cash for my hardware. I don't need the store to link my serial number to my credit card number. I'm already using MAC addresses off of old ISA NIC cards.
I paid 6 million in cash for my scooter, and you can imagine what that looked like. Upshot is I felt very rich and like one of those fellas in those rap videos throwing around money.
I friend lent me $2000 back in the day, so I went to the bank, and got 400 $5 bills. It actually felt empowering, and my friend even had a great time of it.
Yet it wasn't $6M, which just feels like a big number... no matter what the currency.
What logically follows is that the it should be codified that the limit should be raised periodically (yearly?) based on the inflation rate.
Getting gas at night in rural parts of the US without a credit or debit card is already practically impossible – there's nobody there to take your cash. Card-only restaurants, vending machines, shops etc. are already a reality in some countries as well.
I think we urgently need a semi-anonymous, cash-like alternative for low-value online and offline payments, because I feel like once we've lost the anonymity of cash completely, there's no way it'll be reintroduced in a digital equivalent.
The discussion around this seems largely poisoned though, with a lot of vocal crypto/libertarian takes on one side (often tangling the payment privacy aspect with monetary policy), and "nothing to hide, log everything, credit cards and ACH are perfection" on the other.
There was some discussion around the turn of the century that the introduction of the 200/500 Euro notes might impact the USD's status as the dominant "notes in a coffee can buried in the yard" store of wealth for the developing world, but it never went anywhere.
It is interesting that this seems to be a remarkable amount of faith in inflation being a managed slow-walk-- if you had Weimar-style inflation, any fixed limit would be blown through in weeks. Although, perhaps that's a secondary objective there-- if an economy with high paper-trail requirements starts to overheat, pinching the monitoring system might provide additional leverage.
AML is a very convinient tool for anyone who wants to abuse power.
India: India throws another opposition leader in jail as elections loom https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/03/22/india-throws-anoth... from The Economist
Hungary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53093117
Plus Russia
Plus various African countries
Etc.
It prevents crimes as long as the people who would be committing them know it’s hard to cash out. As a simple example, phone theft was much worse in the United States a decade or so back because a teenager could grab a phone, wipe it, and get hundreds of USD. It plummeted once the stolen IMEI database went into effect because nobody buys a phone which can’t get service. It didn’t have to go to zero to be worth doing – just getting the easy money guys out often makes a big difference.
Sure, but "follow the money" can be an incredibly powerful tool for criminal investigations.
> With over reaching AML regime there is a danger that it is used against political opposition, like it is already happening.
That's a concern I definitely share. I think there needs to be a push for a privacy-preserving middle ground between the complete two-sided anonymity of cash and some cryptocurrencies on one side, and the data privacy nightmare that's traditional electronic payment methods.
Will humans ever learn? All evidence I've seen is that they are determined to not.
The consequences of KYC are way worse than that. You have to interact with someone in power when you make a payment, thats the bad part. Cause that someone now have a good occasion to hurt you (racism, discrimination, political opposition, wars, etc).
Im speaking from experience here. Moreover the rich and powerful makes payments the way they want lets not fool ourselves.
Now granted they catch some dirty shit with KYC but we'd like to see some report on the extent of that at least.
What's your example? Only GDPR comes to mind: fuck businesses who destroy anonymity.
Now it's fuck governments who destroy anonymity.